The story behind a Great War postcard - Tony Allen

(10) Footballs in no-mans-land

Another enduring
legend to come out of the Great War was as bizarre as it was brave. The
incident happened in the course of a battle at Contalmaison, near Amiens, and
was recorded on a card, which although not strictly a picture postcard, does
appear in dealers stocks from time into time and as such is shown here. On 1st
July 1916, as British troops clambered out of their trenches on the first day
of the Battle of the Somme, some were kicking footballs ahead of them towards
the German lines, followed by massed ranks of men of the 8th Battalion, the
East Surrey Regiment.

Captain Wilfred
Nevill had given a football to each of his platoon commandeers and ordered them
to boot it towards the German lines so that "proper formation and distance was
not lost."Nevill "urged the men to keep
kicking the ball forward over a mile and a quarter of ground, which they had to
cover in order to reach the German trenches." Nevill led by example and kicked
before him a football on which he had written The Great European Cup Final –
East Surreys v The Bavarians.

Presented free with the children’s comic The Rover, the card
was from a series titled ‘BATTLES FOR THE FLAG.’ Although the illustration on
the card is in colour, it was originally "after a black and white drawing by R.
Caton Woodville from The illustrated London News." There is a brief description
on the back of the card about the incident.

Within ten minutes
of ‘kick-off’, German machine guns mowed down nearly 450 men from the battalion
– including Nevill. However many others survived, and "still the footballs were
booted onwards until the Surreys reached the German trenches." After bombs and
bayonets had done their work and the Germans cleared out of the trenches, "the
surreys looked for their footballs" and recovered two and later sent them to
the Regimental Depot at Kingston-upon-Thames.

In 1998, Dominique Zanardi found an old
leather football on a rubbish tip near the village of Coin. It was an area where
in 1916, British troops were billeted just behind the front line. Zanardi
found the battered old ball among a pile of WW1 British Army equipment.
Apparently, an old man had died in the village and after clearing out his house his grandchildren had thrown the army hoard onto the village dump. Many years earlier the old man, - then just a
boy - had been searching the former battlefield for souvenirs and had found one of Captain Nevill's footballs.